New high performance radio networks have paved the way for new mobile services and applications. For example, many of the new services aim at enhancing the experience of a phone conversation; other services provide for transmission of video signals such as video-on-demand and other similar multimedia services. All such new services involving reception of any type of multimedia at a receiver require monitoring of the perceived received quality. This to ensure that users experience good quality and get the service they expect. In other words multimedia services such as video streaming quality perceived by the end user is one important service quality measurement for operators of all types of networks. Possible service problems need to be troubleshot.
The subjectively perceived video quality can be estimated with an objective video quality model. The video quality value can be a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) value or another suitable measure. MOS is the mean value of grades from a subjective test, where test persons grade a multimedia clip in a scale ranging from 1 for the poorest quality to 5 for the best quality.
Today, there exist a number of commercial tools for measuring and estimating multimedia quality. However, the products for determining video quality on the market today base their video quality estimation mostly on video image analysis. An approach based on video image analysis puts a high demand on the computational capacity of the tool used because the algorithms used in such analysis are in themselves very computationally demanding. This in turn makes it difficult to produce an output result in real-time.
Another problem encountered with existing solutions is that they are sensitive to change in context in the video signal because they typically base their output on an analysis between different frames of a video sequence in the case of an estimation of video quality.
Yet another problem with existing solutions, wherein original video is compared to a received video (so called full reference method), is the need for synchronization between consecutive frames in order to generate a meaningful output result.
There is therefore a need for a method that requires less computational power and which hence can be implemented in a device that is inexpensive to manufacture and easy to operate.